“I often turn to poetry when I get stuck writing. Not far from where I write is an at-hand stack of slim volumes that includes Olena Kalytiak Davis’s And Her Soul Out of Nothing, Dana Levin’s In the Surgical Theatre, Cynthia Cruz’s The Glimmering Room, August Kleinzahler’s Green Sees Things in Waves, Christian Hawkey’s The Book of Funnels, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard. I’ll open to a random poem and more often than not—with these poets in particular—I have the sensation of falling, and the thrill of that helps me stop overthinking my own writing. Sometimes just one line or stanza will unlock a frozen idea in my mind. Honestly, The Absolution of Robert Acestes Laing would have existed in a much more broken form if it weren’t for these lines from Dana Levin’s poem ‘Silo’: ‘Will you be pricked? Will you awake? / And move from this place / where the silo dwarfs you, the years inside / its tyrannous shadow.’ Levin’s book falls open to that poem, which carried me through the storm of dark thoughts that I willed into existence, so that I could write the novel.”
—Nicholas Rombes, author of The Absolution of Robert Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio, 2014)